Otter.ai adds AI-generated meeting summaries and new home feed

As a transcription service, it made its name as slick. As this type of automated transcription becomes more commonplace, the company is expanding its scope to include a host of features, including artificial intelligence-generated meeting summaries, with the aim of turning users into collaborative hubs for work.

The goal is to cater to the company's growing number of enterprise customers.

When accessing accounts on the web, users will now see a home feed that pulls together transcriptions and a calendar of upcoming meetings into a single overview. They'll be able to jump into meetings directly from their calendar and use integrations with services like Microsoft Teams and Google Meet to record and transcribe the audio.

There are many ways in which the transcriptions can be added. Meeting summaries are supposed to highlight the most important moments in recordings. These are parts of the transcript that have been highlighted by users, who can then tag in co-workers and add comments or tasks. It is now easier to reference visual material discussed during meetings with the addition of a single click.

Meeting summaries are the most intriguing feature. Even though the tool was far from perfect, it was a great start and we haven't been able to test it for ourselves.

The company's software looks at a lot of different factors to decide what is relevant from a meeting. We look at the speaker dynamics, who is talking and what topics they discuss. It is always a combination and never just based on one signal.

When new topics of conversation were introduced, the tool seemed to pick out when the speaker changed, as we were shown a preview of the software. It is unlikely that machine learning could match the knowledge of a human, who would know more about the background and context of a meeting.

A tool that could be useful when trying to balance collaboration in teams is the breakdown of who spends the most time in a meeting talking. There is more analysis that could be done that would allow for a bigger total addressable market.

The other startups are moving fast. One company called Poised promises to coach users on their presentation skills by analyzing things like their use of words and speaking speed. Sembly has similar meeting summaries.

The bigger threat is from companies like Microsoft and Google, whose expertise in artificial intelligence would allow them to quickly create such features themselves and offer them to a much larger audience. They are already ahead. Microsoft's PowerPoint, which offers its own speech analysis and tips for presenting, is one of the examples. When asked about the threat, Liang said that it will succeed because it is focused on a single product and tech giants are distracted by their interests.

The question is: how obsessed are you? The CEO of the company makes most of their money from Search and YouTube.

He says that the obsession is turning meeting transcripts into action plans for Otter. The company has to follow through.